Norway? The economy that is slowly moving away from being government mandated and towards capitalism? Economy that is based on energy export?
Japan and Germany? Economies that could be doing so much BETTER if it was NOT for their stupid, worthless governments? Economies that are destroyed by governments on every day basis?
Yeah, somebody does need to learn something about history.
Greed is the only incentive that is real that moves progress forward. The real problem is greed in government, which grows government at the expense of the real economy.
Union is a private collective, which means it does not have any more power than any other private entity. It doesn't enjoy the privilege of being able to send the police and national guard or even military forces to your doors. It can't pass legislation and it can't force you by law into anything.
Gov't, OTOH, is exactly that. So if you don't understand that distinction, I won't bother you with my replies much.
Of-course there is nothing positive that government can do to fix it by any more regulations, laws or government spending and offices. What it can do is what it should do and what it won't do, because the last time it did something like that was 1921, and cutting 70% of itself is sort of like committing harakiri and admitting that gov't has only one role in economy - which is destruction. They won't fire themselves..... all those protests at Wall Street, they should really try and figure out what the real problem is and go protest at their closest Federal reserve banks.
Anyway, this whole idea of unemployment benefits should be abolished. SS, Medicare, EI, it should all be responsibility of the employee, not employer. Employers are not your babysitters, but they should be paying market rates for you, that's all.
If you have a CONTRACT with employer that requires some EI payments, that's a different story.
The entire system is rotten to the core, obviously gov't has created an impossible to continue situation, it can only be truly resolved by dissolving the entire system of regulations, labor laws, business regulations, income/payroll/corporate taxes, all of this has to go.
Rights are between individual and collective, they have nothing to do with relationship between 2 individuals.
I don't give a shit about your rights, your rights are between you and your government. Individually and privately it's about contract and criminal laws (and who has a better gun and a faster hand.)
Actually a PRIVATE union that has no government support of any kind, not getting any special privileges - I never am against people doing anything privately.
OTOH, I wouldn't keep a union employed for longer than I found enough substitute workers.
Oh, and by the way, it's quite stupid to say that a person who was persecuted by government would want MORE government. It's just a retarded way of thinking. Trust me, one thing my great-grandfather hated more than anything in his life was that government system and he wanted nothing to do with it. Use your brains for once.
First: market is a price discovery mechanism, it's a discounting mechanism, it takes all of those issues into account (absent gov't bullshit.)
Second: unemployment in USA is over 20%, CPI is over 11% and GDP has been falling for over 15 years at 10% per year based on the wrong CPI deflater. 50 million people are on SS (some of them are working), near 30 million are working for governments in various capacities, including contractors and mercs. 40% of the economy is so called 'financial sector'.
The actual PRODUCTIVE part of US economy is about 7%. That's all of the production.
90% of US seafood is imported from Asia, did you know that? USA is surrounded with oceans and it has lakes and rivers, yet 90% of seafood is imported.
The 53Billion USD/month shows that USA under-produces and under-exports by 53Billion USD/month. That's all that matters, whatever you do inside the country doesn't matter if you import by 53Billion USD/month more than you export.
Third: there is no such thing as 'civil rights'.
For example: 1964 - civil rights act. What did it do? Today unemployment among blacks is higher than for other groups, 50% of young blacks before age 24 are unemployed. Before 1964 that number was 15%.
That's right, so what changed? A few things, beside China: 1. Minimum wage kept creeping up. 2. All of these entitlement laws, that put obligations upon employers and make employers liable and drive costs of hiring those, who are covered with special protections of the "civil rights act" up.
Why would anybody hire an American? But DOUBLY why would anybody hire an American, who has special privileges, entitlements protected by government that put obligations upon the employers, which in reality means that employers often face lawsuits and various fines and who knows how much money it ends up costing?
Also of-course the loan guarantees that went into the education system and all of the money thrown at medical insurance and care and SS. All of this nonsense, never mind the wars, unemployment in USA is direct response of the market to the rising costs of employment, and this is not even about wages.
AFAIC if Obama wants to direct a specific jobs plan at blacks, he should immediately repeal all of the special protections granted to blacks and he should abolish the minimum tax.
To make everybody more employable they should abolish SS, Medicare, stop all wars and spending and stop abolish all business regulations and income taxes.
Only government harakiri can fix the economy at this point. Like they did in 1921.
Last thing: no. Neither I, nor my predecessors wanted ANY government privileges, the only important thing is RIGHTS.
Individual rights and those are the only important protections that must be provided and that's why people even agree upon governments in the first place. Of-course there are few places where people actually get to AGREE on what a government is, it's just imposed upon them, and that's all there is to it. That's what made USA special - people came up with government on their own, threw out the old system, the kings, and came up with a Constitution that LIMITED government. Gov't was set up to protect individual liberties, so that was a good set up.
USSR on the other hand also threw away the tzar (king), but what it did instead was total oppression of individual by the collective, and this destroys the people and economy, it cannot be allowed. Somalia went through a civil war just to remove a communist type of government. They set up what works for them, there are parts of it that are governed by what people agree (local law) and there are parts that still have fighting going on between clans, but it has nothing to do with protecting anybody's individual rights.
As I said, if the employer is an asshole to the point where everybody hates him - quit altogether.
Just everybody - quit at once and don't show up. Let him man the kitchen and the rest of it all on his own. It's not going to be easy for him, you may even end up shutting him down (depending on his margins).
My point is - saying that something is a 'right', while it's an entitlement and an obligation is a ruse.
I am suggesting people should stop voting for politicians who go beyond the authority that Constitution gives them, but what does this have to do with EI?
I am pretty sure nobody is forcing to read my comments, but I am also pretty sure that this thread is very appropriate for them. I don't know what you think/. is for, AFAIC it's a discussion forum. Anything that is discussed has multiple facets to it, economy and politics are at least as important as technology when talking about events. My reply in this thread is on topic IN THIS THREAD.
I am against all so called 'labor rights' and 'civil rights' all of those. Those are not rights.
There are only individual rights. The 'civil or labor rights' are actually entitlements given by government decree to some, while imposing obligations on others.
Just because you are an employer doesn't mean you now have to lose your individual rights and have all these obligations and have to hire people in exact accordance with how the government prescribes it.
You don't like this asshole? Don't work for him. NOBODY is forcing you to work for him.
Maybe ALL his workers should QUIT right away because he is an asshole. But he has his individual rights and they have their individual rights, and there are no such things as civil or labor rights, and I had a very very very lengthy discussion about it on this very site just a couple of days ago on this very issue.
There are only individual rights, but there are also entitlements and obligations, but those are not the same as rights, but they do raise the cost of doing business, they raise the cost of hiring people especially due to all of the possible litigation.
Yes, this guy is an asshole. No, you shouldn't have any special privileges and entitlements to deal with assholes in private, you do have your individual rights.
'Right' is a concept that is only meaningful to describe a relationship between an individual an government, because gov't is a system, not an individual.
Relationships between private individuals and businesses are covered by criminal and contract law, and unless this employer violated the contract, there are no criminal charges and there must not be any other special protections by government, which only cause more economic destruction.
The problem you have here is that you're working with an extremely simple model - 2 goods, one factor of production. The world is an exceedingly complex place.
- I am trying to bring a point across.
Of-course world is complex, but the basic interaction in trade remains the same: I want YOU to produce something that is valuable in trade between YOU and ANY market participant.
It does not have to be me. But if I produce something and everybody else produces something, then by using money we just allow ourselves to exchange the goods we produce.
If HALF of the people produce and HALF of the people don't produce, I don't want to SHARE the SAME MONEY with them.
Do you understand? Sharing currency with people who use it by borrowing/printing, but who do not produce anything useful in the market is like giving your stuff away for free, and why would I want to do that? I just want to go to a vacation then instead of keeping up the work.
-- This idiot - Roseanne Barr wants to kill anybody who makes over $100,000,000/year if they don't GIVE UP anything over that.
First she'd put them into 'reeducation camps' of-course. My great-grandfather went through a system like that. He was a farmer in Ukraine and had a bunch of kids (many kids) and he was 'raskulachen' - his farm was stolen from him by the Soviet gov't in 1930s. They were sent in a train (where they had to stand all the way, because there was no space in it) to Kazakhstan from Ukraine. His wife and half of the kids died in the road. In Kazakhstan he restarted the farm again, and it was taken away from him AGAIN in fifties! Because he was AGAIN doing BETTER than the collective farms around him in Kazakhstan. That's just one story. He didn't get shot by the way, I don't know why. Millions did.
She wants guillotine for those who won't give up more than $100,000,000/year. WHY WORK then once you already have the $100,000,000/year? OK, anybody who owns a company that can make him that money should shut down the factory once he reaches the yearly goal that Roseanne before him and then go to a vacation for the rest of the year. What would that do to the economy?
But that's just a STUPID person talking. Bet she makes just a little under that, but the point is that her message - it's designed to incite VIOLENCE and it will hurt the economy.
If those idiots protesters wanted to do something REAL, they should have gone to all the Federal Reserve Banks in all the cities.
THAT'S where shit is really happening. That's who is instrumental in destroying the economy and currency and financing all these wars and all these banks and making the people poor in the process.
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The rest of your remarks are way off target, you may want to check my journal. I KNOW that Asia and China in particular are way more capitalist than anybody else on the planet today.
I KNOW that US GDP is cooked, especially given how cooked the CPI numbers are, so the deflater is fake. The GDP has been falling by 10% annually for 15 years at least now.
The ONLY reason that US labor force is so expensive is GOVERNMENT intervention into the economy:
Wars, SS, Medicare, minimum wage, civil rights (in reality entitlements and obligations, not rights), all the labor laws. Dep't of energy, education, agriculture, small business, transportation, FDIC, FDA, EPA, FAA, FCC, FHA, Freddie/Fannie, CIA, FBI etc.etc., these are all the reasons that US labor is uncompetitive and too expensive.
It's not about wages, it's about all of the expensive litigation that is forced upon the employers that lose their rights at the moment they hire anybody in USA. Nobody should hire in USA, this is the stupidest thing to do - to hire in USA. You lose all of your rights if you do this. They will take you through the court system, you'll pay huge fines and lawyer fees, everything, because you do not
Not controling the market too much actually made all the mess.
- Not controlling the GOVERNMENT made all the mess.
Market is controlled by the veto and vote of an individual. One buys iPad because he likes it, another person buys Samsung Galaxy because they like it. Somebody is selling more, somebody is selling less.
Then you have gov't intervention, it protects companies with limited liability, with patents, copyrights, you name it. All of a sudden you are a consumer (in Germany) who cannot BUY a Samsung Galaxy pad because government said so.
How is that beneficial to the market? It's not. But it's beneficial to the power of politics, which gets to decide who wins and who loses and destroys the market.
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Gov't got itself this 'authority' to counterfeit money. Well it does NOT have that authority. It sets prices for money - short and now long (TWIST) term interest rates.
It does NOT have that authority!
Gov't decided to guarantee mortgage loans. It never had that authority!
Gov't decided to guarantee people giving loans to banks (so called deposits, but those are loans). FDIC. Gov't did not have that authority.
Gov't decided to guarantee SS and Medicare and minimum wage and the so called 'civil rights', which in reality are entitlements and obligations. It never had that authority.
Gov't decides everything, from your education to your health and insurance, to your roads and your wars, and your money cost and your money worth, and what goes into your food etc.etc.etc.
None of this is authorized to the federal government. Instead of completely misunderstanding the issue, you should look at the facts that before 1913 the US economy was growing steadily and there was deflation of money supply, while quality of life was going up.
Henry Ford was not regulated by gov't. He was regulated by markets when he decided to pay twice as much as others and to cut week to 5 days and day to 8 hours. He was paying an equivalent of 120K today based on gold cost (and people didn't pay income tax). A guy with just reading/writing/arithmetic skills was able to have a family with a stay at home wife, 5-6 kids, his own hose, paid for his own retirement and his kids studied privately and he paid for his own (and his family's) health insurance and care.
And it was all done without debt. And he could buy a Ford automobile he was producing with only 4 months of salary (and of-course people didn't do that, but they could save for a few years and actually buy with cash.)
All of this was possible NOT because of gov't regulations but because gov't was NOT regulating the way it does now.
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It's not about every human becoming rich in terms of money. It's about every human becoming rich in terms of what he can afford to buy.
The industrial revolution and capitalism allowed the poorest of people to start gaining purchasing power with little money that used to belong only to the richest.
Doing your own dishes? Not if you are a rich person prior to 19 century. But within 19 century? Anybody could have a washing machine (unless they lived in formers USSR or Soviet China).
The point is that government can only destroy wealth by taking it away from those who create it. People create wealth to live better.
Those with money can afford to be more enterprising, and that's what economy needs - not more gov't but instead more enterprising people.
But you can't have more enterprising people AND more government SIMULTANEOUSLY.
Oh, and just in case it is not very clear from the other comment that I left as a response to you, here is the 'kernel' of it, so to speak.
On this planet there are billions of people who are poor, they still do not have things they want.
These are billions of potential producers and consumers, but they need to be organized, their work needs to be used to create the things they all need.
Thus it is not true that you have all those 'robots' today, that can produce everything everybody wants and needs. So there is a huge, gigantic, untapped market and productive capacity resource, and it needs to be tapped and it needs to be turned into a productive market.
So saying: there are all these people, and they will kill you if you don't give them something - fuck them. Those with capital need to leave now and start businesses all over the world, because there is HUGE potential that is not USA and Western world. If USA and Western world want to live by consuming products others produce, they MUST learn that they can only do so by producing something in return.
The only way to do this meaningfully is to allow the market sort out what is needed by market and what is not. Market will figure out the products and services and prices for them and what money is and what regulations are.
So the only way to fix this for USA and Western world is to REDUCE their gov't, not to increase it. There is plenty of demand, but those with that demand are not producing anything, but they would be happy to live wealthier lives, where they CAN buy all those things that an average American can buy right now with counterfeit currency.
Resources are scarce. You can go ahead and create a new device, say an 'iCrap' or whatever, and all of a sudden it IS a scarce device, because only you have it.
Somebody else goes and creates another device 'iShit' and they also are the only ones who have it now.
Anything that any person organizes and creates is a scarce resource, and the pricing model depends on what markets will bear.
As to robots creating everything - once you have your super stuff printers and once you figure out the infinite energy, then you will get your wish. Everybody will be sitting there, printing apples and egg salads and shoes and flying cars and new windows for their sea-houses, etc.
As long as energy is not that easy to get, as long as there are no element trans-mutating, molecule bond and long carbon chain printers, etc., that can produce whatever you want for you immediately, there will be scarcity.
Even when you get all of that, somebody will figure out a way to have your body go on for a longer period of time, all of a sudden THAT is a scarce thing - scarce information. Probably a scarce set of machines and procedures are needed, this becomes the new power - being able to prolong your life.
In a place where things are basically free, the power will be then transfered into other realms, like being able to prolong your life, but what will people be paying with? Because nobody wants to GIVE UP such a thing that they own. If you can prolong your life indefinitely and others cannot, you become an interesting outsider with more and more power of some sort over others.
Free stuff does not really come for free. This will modify the humans if not necessarily immediately physically, then mentally and emotionally, they will become something else and there will be a way to get power over them and some people will seek it, as people always do.
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Anyway, until that time that all physical things are easy to multiply at no cost, normal rules of scarcity and economics will continue be applicable.
You invent your 'iShit' and somebody else invents 'iCrap' and you want to exchange the 'iShit' for 'iCrap' and thus this type of relationship will continue and those who invent this stuff and organize capital, land and labor to produce this more efficiently than others will gain market share and will be rich.
But to answer your unwarranted question about 'whining' and 'fairness' - AFAIC people don't want to work, but they will have to, because again, the system we have now is NOT the system that you are describing, with everything being 'free'.
It's NOT free. Somebody has to do WORK. Thus your jabs do not reach their destination - the market will continue as it does, and the only people who will suffer are those, who will participate in market destruction via gov't regulations and taxes and subsidies.
They don't DESERVE your 'iCrap' if they don't produce their 'iShit' that you can get from them by exchange. So you'll produce your 'iCrap' in China and they will stay without anything, any 'iCraps' and 'iShits', they won't have any of it, they'll keep being poor. Since they are also ignorant and quite dumb, they will likely try to build what was tried a number of times and failed as many times - some sort of a communist regime to try and avoid the personal responsibility of running their own lives and economies. This only leads to total loss of all rights and total loss of all wealth.
Just so's you know, the problem isn't taxes, it's demand.
- Just so you know, the problem is not demand, it's supply.
You see, when 2 people trade they are not trading for money, they are trading for things they want. If 1 produces food and another produces fuel, they are trading food for fuel. They are doing so because they both benefit from the comparative advantage of each doing something better - more efficiently than the other.
Money is introduced into the system so it's easy to trade for things that are of not equal value, so a kitchen food processor is not the same value as one eggplant for example.
Money always begins as something valuable, scarce, recognizable, easy to test, easy to measure, not poisonous, not explosive, not radioactive, easy to mint coins out of and something that does not go bad over time, so we've used gold for ages. Eventually people always try to counterfeit the money to be able to BUY stuff but produce NOTHING for it. They invent all sorts of scams, which can be even benign at first - introduce paper bank notes to signify amount of actual gold that a person has, trade with notes, but go to a bank and get your actual money out of it.
Eventually the government hijacks the system and figures out a way to steal everybody's money and start counterfeiting just the paper itself, thus stealing everybody's purchasing power and stealing products without creating anything back into the system. So this is wealth stolen and goods underproduced.
USA is running a scam like that upon the rest of the world because its currency is so called 'reserve' and other productive people give it things, products for the fake currency USA is printing, but nothing can be gotten from USA for this fake currency.
53Billion USD/month and 40% of all gov't money borrowed that is spent is the indicator that USA as a country and the government itself cannot pay for what it consumes, but there is plenty of demand. ALL of the counterfeit money, ALL of the borrowing, ALL of the taxing - it's all demand.
But those who want to consume are not producing. But the reason that production capacity isn't present in the system is the very government that PRICED OUT the US worker from the labor market with all of the regulations, taxes, subsidies, labor laws, everything that makes US worker unproductive, uncompetitive, not worth hiring and thus in reality useless to those, who actually produce for living, and even worse - dead weight, that is consuming but not producing to balance the trade.
Balancing of the trade is not just an esoteric abstract concept, it's very obvious from the monthly imbalance of trade that is easy to show in exact amount of money that is sent abroad minus the money that is sent into USA. The difference is what USA is underproducing.
Those who create jobs - the 'rich', (and no, poor do not create jobs, with any sort of subsidy they only consume wealth, they don't produce it), they now are under a constant attack from all fronts, which is set up by the government that hijacked the economy and is now ruling it into a total collapse.
What is needed is complete stop of all government spending except for bare minimum border protection and the court system. EVERYTHING else needs to stop, all spending needs to stop, all borrowing, debts need to be restructured, millions of unproductive people need to LOSE their jobs. TENS of millions, of people need to lose their jobs. The consumption must stop. People will have to work in order to save real investment capital and restart production and then people can be rehired to do useful, trade imbalance reducing jobs.
NOBODY should be getting any QE, any TARP, any counterfeit money from any government, it all must be balanced within the economy without government intervention.
Economies are created by private individuals who work to live better, that's all there is to it. When economies become strong and rich, governments - the parasites of the economy - become stronger b
This is what Nobel prize should be about - not about politics and non-sciences, like Keynesian witch craft of one solution.
Giving a prize for figuring out how the immune system works? Good.
Giving out a 'war is peace' prize to Obama or 'print till you run out of trees' Krugman? Well, that's just a political statement and I am not sure what good it is at all.
why would you come out with such a ridiculous statement?
WHO says this is the first time this has been done? What is NEW is that the government is fully acknowledging that it is what it's doing, and it's getting CHEERS and APPLAUSE for this, especially from the weird crowd of strange GOP followers, the same kind of people who cheer to Perry when he talks about execution of prisoners and the same guys who cheer for death of person who may not have health insurance - the second one being a very loaded idea, since that would be a strange situation in free market with low prices and a 30 y.o., who'd be making good money in that economy, even if he didn't have insurance, which would be very cheap (insurance used to cost $1/month/person prior to Medicare) and health care would be cheap and all of those products would be getting cheaper every year due to technology and larger markets and thus more competition.
So that crowd of people is now cheering, but also the other crowd is cheering - those of the Democrats who are NOT protesting. Weren't they protesting against the Patriot Act of Bush time, and that thing was only about unconstitutional searches and seizures and prisons, this here is unconstitutional KILLING.
But of-course US gov't killed people prior to this, they did that covertly, which means they at least knew the difference and knew that it was the wrong thing to do. Now they are doing it overtly, totally in the open and are getting applause for this.
Slashdot Mirror
Norway? The economy that is slowly moving away from being government mandated and towards capitalism? Economy that is based on energy export?
Japan and Germany? Economies that could be doing so much BETTER if it was NOT for their stupid, worthless governments? Economies that are destroyed by governments on every day basis?
Yeah, somebody does need to learn something about history.
Nope. The problem is described in my journal, it's simple, it's gov't destroying productivity of Americans by destroying the capital savings, which is also the reason that the market now is a casino with people not investing but gambling.
Greed is the only incentive that is real that moves progress forward. The real problem is greed in government, which grows government at the expense of the real economy.
Union is a private collective, which means it does not have any more power than any other private entity. It doesn't enjoy the privilege of being able to send the police and national guard or even military forces to your doors. It can't pass legislation and it can't force you by law into anything.
Gov't, OTOH, is exactly that. So if you don't understand that distinction, I won't bother you with my replies much.
Of-course it is.
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Of-course there is nothing positive that government can do to fix it by any more regulations, laws or government spending and offices. What it can do is what it should do and what it won't do, because the last time it did something like that was 1921, and cutting 70% of itself is sort of like committing harakiri and admitting that gov't has only one role in economy - which is destruction. They won't fire themselves..... all those protests at Wall Street, they should really try and figure out what the real problem is and go protest at their closest Federal reserve banks.
you RTFA? WTF? You are not supposed to!
Anyway, this whole idea of unemployment benefits should be abolished. SS, Medicare, EI, it should all be responsibility of the employee, not employer. Employers are not your babysitters, but they should be paying market rates for you, that's all.
If you have a CONTRACT with employer that requires some EI payments, that's a different story.
The entire system is rotten to the core, obviously gov't has created an impossible to continue situation, it can only be truly resolved by dissolving the entire system of regulations, labor laws, business regulations, income/payroll/corporate taxes, all of this has to go.
Rights are between individual and collective, they have nothing to do with relationship between 2 individuals.
I don't give a shit about your rights, your rights are between you and your government. Individually and privately it's about contract and criminal laws (and who has a better gun and a faster hand.)
Actually a PRIVATE union that has no government support of any kind, not getting any special privileges - I never am against people doing anything privately.
OTOH, I wouldn't keep a union employed for longer than I found enough substitute workers.
Oh, and by the way, it's quite stupid to say that a person who was persecuted by government would want MORE government. It's just a retarded way of thinking. Trust me, one thing my great-grandfather hated more than anything in his life was that government system and he wanted nothing to do with it. Use your brains for once.
First: market is a price discovery mechanism, it's a discounting mechanism, it takes all of those issues into account (absent gov't bullshit.)
Second: unemployment in USA is over 20%, CPI is over 11% and GDP has been falling for over 15 years at 10% per year based on the wrong CPI deflater. 50 million people are on SS (some of them are working), near 30 million are working for governments in various capacities, including contractors and mercs. 40% of the economy is so called 'financial sector'.
The actual PRODUCTIVE part of US economy is about 7%. That's all of the production.
90% of US seafood is imported from Asia, did you know that? USA is surrounded with oceans and it has lakes and rivers, yet 90% of seafood is imported.
The 53Billion USD/month shows that USA under-produces and under-exports by 53Billion USD/month. That's all that matters, whatever you do inside the country doesn't matter if you import by 53Billion USD/month more than you export.
Third: there is no such thing as 'civil rights'.
For example: 1964 - civil rights act. What did it do? Today unemployment among blacks is higher than for other groups, 50% of young blacks before age 24 are unemployed. Before 1964 that number was 15%.
That's right, so what changed? A few things, beside China:
1. Minimum wage kept creeping up.
2. All of these entitlement laws, that put obligations upon employers and make employers liable and drive costs of hiring those, who are covered with special protections of the "civil rights act" up.
Why would anybody hire an American? But DOUBLY why would anybody hire an American, who has special privileges, entitlements protected by government that put obligations upon the employers, which in reality means that employers often face lawsuits and various fines and who knows how much money it ends up costing?
Also of-course the loan guarantees that went into the education system and all of the money thrown at medical insurance and care and SS. All of this nonsense, never mind the wars, unemployment in USA is direct response of the market to the rising costs of employment, and this is not even about wages.
AFAIC if Obama wants to direct a specific jobs plan at blacks, he should immediately repeal all of the special protections granted to blacks and he should abolish the minimum tax.
To make everybody more employable they should abolish SS, Medicare, stop all wars and spending and stop abolish all business regulations and income taxes.
Only government harakiri can fix the economy at this point. Like they did in 1921.
Last thing: no. Neither I, nor my predecessors wanted ANY government privileges, the only important thing is RIGHTS.
Individual rights and those are the only important protections that must be provided and that's why people even agree upon governments in the first place. Of-course there are few places where people actually get to AGREE on what a government is, it's just imposed upon them, and that's all there is to it. That's what made USA special - people came up with government on their own, threw out the old system, the kings, and came up with a Constitution that LIMITED government. Gov't was set up to protect individual liberties, so that was a good set up.
USSR on the other hand also threw away the tzar (king), but what it did instead was total oppression of individual by the collective, and this destroys the people and economy, it cannot be allowed. Somalia went through a civil war just to remove a communist type of government. They set up what works for them, there are parts of it that are governed by what people agree (local law) and there are parts that still have fighting going on between clans, but it has nothing to do with protecting anybody's individual rights.
As I said, if the employer is an asshole to the point where everybody hates him - quit altogether.
Just everybody - quit at once and don't show up. Let him man the kitchen and the rest of it all on his own. It's not going to be easy for him, you may even end up shutting him down (depending on his margins).
My point is - saying that something is a 'right', while it's an entitlement and an obligation is a ruse.
First, I don't fully follow your point.
I am suggesting people should stop voting for politicians who go beyond the authority that Constitution gives them, but what does this have to do with EI?
I am pretty sure nobody is forcing to read my comments, but I am also pretty sure that this thread is very appropriate for them. I don't know what you think /. is for, AFAIC it's a discussion forum. Anything that is discussed has multiple facets to it, economy and politics are at least as important as technology when talking about events. My reply in this thread is on topic IN THIS THREAD.
I am against all so called 'labor rights' and 'civil rights' all of those. Those are not rights.
There are only individual rights. The 'civil or labor rights' are actually entitlements given by government decree to some, while imposing obligations on others.
Just because you are an employer doesn't mean you now have to lose your individual rights and have all these obligations and have to hire people in exact accordance with how the government prescribes it.
You don't like this asshole? Don't work for him. NOBODY is forcing you to work for him.
Maybe ALL his workers should QUIT right away because he is an asshole. But he has his individual rights and they have their individual rights, and there are no such things as civil or labor rights, and I had a very very very lengthy discussion about it on this very site just a couple of days ago on this very issue.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37575982
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37554214
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37558726
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37558814
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37558814
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37556278
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37553622
There are only individual rights, but there are also entitlements and obligations, but those are not the same as rights, but they do raise the cost of doing business, they raise the cost of hiring people especially due to all of the possible litigation.
Yes, this guy is an asshole.
No, you shouldn't have any special privileges and entitlements to deal with assholes in private, you do have your individual rights.
'Right' is a concept that is only meaningful to describe a relationship between an individual an government, because gov't is a system, not an individual.
Relationships between private individuals and businesses are covered by criminal and contract law, and unless this employer violated the contract, there are no criminal charges and there must not be any other special protections by government, which only cause more economic destruction.
The problem you have here is that you're working with an extremely simple model - 2 goods, one factor of production. The world is an exceedingly complex place.
- I am trying to bring a point across.
Of-course world is complex, but the basic interaction in trade remains the same: I want YOU to produce something that is valuable in trade between YOU and ANY market participant.
It does not have to be me. But if I produce something and everybody else produces something, then by using money we just allow ourselves to exchange the goods we produce.
If HALF of the people produce and HALF of the people don't produce, I don't want to SHARE the SAME MONEY with them.
Do you understand? Sharing currency with people who use it by borrowing/printing, but who do not produce anything useful in the market is like giving your stuff away for free, and why would I want to do that? I just want to go to a vacation then instead of keeping up the work.
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This idiot - Roseanne Barr wants to kill anybody who makes over $100,000,000/year if they don't GIVE UP anything over that.
First she'd put them into 'reeducation camps' of-course. My great-grandfather went through a system like that. He was a farmer in Ukraine and had a bunch of kids (many kids) and he was 'raskulachen' - his farm was stolen from him by the Soviet gov't in 1930s. They were sent in a train (where they had to stand all the way, because there was no space in it) to Kazakhstan from Ukraine. His wife and half of the kids died in the road. In Kazakhstan he restarted the farm again, and it was taken away from him AGAIN in fifties! Because he was AGAIN doing BETTER than the collective farms around him in Kazakhstan. That's just one story. He didn't get shot by the way, I don't know why. Millions did.
She wants guillotine for those who won't give up more than $100,000,000/year. WHY WORK then once you already have the $100,000,000/year? OK, anybody who owns a company that can make him that money should shut down the factory once he reaches the yearly goal that Roseanne before him and then go to a vacation for the rest of the year. What would that do to the economy?
But that's just a STUPID person talking. Bet she makes just a little under that, but the point is that her message - it's designed to incite VIOLENCE and it will hurt the economy.
If those idiots protesters wanted to do something REAL, they should have gone to all the Federal Reserve Banks in all the cities.
THAT'S where shit is really happening. That's who is instrumental in destroying the economy and currency and financing all these wars and all these banks and making the people poor in the process.
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The rest of your remarks are way off target, you may want to check my journal. I KNOW that Asia and China in particular are way more capitalist than anybody else on the planet today.
I KNOW that US GDP is cooked, especially given how cooked the CPI numbers are, so the deflater is fake. The GDP has been falling by 10% annually for 15 years at least now.
The ONLY reason that US labor force is so expensive is GOVERNMENT intervention into the economy:
Wars, SS, Medicare, minimum wage, civil rights (in reality entitlements and obligations, not rights), all the labor laws. Dep't of energy, education, agriculture, small business, transportation, FDIC, FDA, EPA, FAA, FCC, FHA, Freddie/Fannie, CIA, FBI etc.etc., these are all the reasons that US labor is uncompetitive and too expensive.
It's not about wages, it's about all of the expensive litigation that is forced upon the employers that lose their rights at the moment they hire anybody in USA. Nobody should hire in USA, this is the stupidest thing to do - to hire in USA. You lose all of your rights if you do this. They will take you through the court system, you'll pay huge fines and lawyer fees, everything, because you do not
Not controling the market too much actually made all the mess.
- Not controlling the GOVERNMENT made all the mess.
Market is controlled by the veto and vote of an individual. One buys iPad because he likes it, another person buys Samsung Galaxy because they like it. Somebody is selling more, somebody is selling less.
Then you have gov't intervention, it protects companies with limited liability, with patents, copyrights, you name it. All of a sudden you are a consumer (in Germany) who cannot BUY a Samsung Galaxy pad because government said so.
How is that beneficial to the market? It's not. But it's beneficial to the power of politics, which gets to decide who wins and who loses and destroys the market.
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Gov't got itself this 'authority' to counterfeit money. Well it does NOT have that authority. It sets prices for money - short and now long (TWIST) term interest rates.
It does NOT have that authority!
Gov't decided to guarantee mortgage loans. It never had that authority!
Gov't decided to guarantee people giving loans to banks (so called deposits, but those are loans). FDIC. Gov't did not have that authority.
Gov't decided to guarantee SS and Medicare and minimum wage and the so called 'civil rights', which in reality are entitlements and obligations. It never had that authority.
Gov't decides everything, from your education to your health and insurance, to your roads and your wars, and your money cost and your money worth, and what goes into your food etc.etc.etc.
None of this is authorized to the federal government. Instead of completely misunderstanding the issue, you should look at the facts that before 1913 the US economy was growing steadily and there was deflation of money supply, while quality of life was going up.
Henry Ford was not regulated by gov't. He was regulated by markets when he decided to pay twice as much as others and to cut week to 5 days and day to 8 hours. He was paying an equivalent of 120K today based on gold cost (and people didn't pay income tax). A guy with just reading/writing/arithmetic skills was able to have a family with a stay at home wife, 5-6 kids, his own hose, paid for his own retirement and his kids studied privately and he paid for his own (and his family's) health insurance and care.
And it was all done without debt. And he could buy a Ford automobile he was producing with only 4 months of salary (and of-course people didn't do that, but they could save for a few years and actually buy with cash.)
All of this was possible NOT because of gov't regulations but because gov't was NOT regulating the way it does now.
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It's not about every human becoming rich in terms of money. It's about every human becoming rich in terms of what he can afford to buy.
The industrial revolution and capitalism allowed the poorest of people to start gaining purchasing power with little money that used to belong only to the richest.
Doing your own dishes? Not if you are a rich person prior to 19 century. But within 19 century? Anybody could have a washing machine (unless they lived in formers USSR or Soviet China).
The point is that government can only destroy wealth by taking it away from those who create it. People create wealth to live better.
Those with money can afford to be more enterprising, and that's what economy needs - not more gov't but instead more enterprising people.
But you can't have more enterprising people AND more government SIMULTANEOUSLY.
Well this is BS, somebody is moderating the comments 'off-topic', then they should moderate the entire THREAD off-topic.
These comments are ON topic in this THREAD.
Somebody just doesn't like the real economic message, now that's more like it.
You should go back to the grammar school, if even an English as a Fourth Language guy like me is cringing from reading your crap.
Oh, and just in case it is not very clear from the other comment that I left as a response to you, here is the 'kernel' of it, so to speak.
On this planet there are billions of people who are poor, they still do not have things they want.
These are billions of potential producers and consumers, but they need to be organized, their work needs to be used to create the things they all need.
Thus it is not true that you have all those 'robots' today, that can produce everything everybody wants and needs. So there is a huge, gigantic, untapped market and productive capacity resource, and it needs to be tapped and it needs to be turned into a productive market.
So saying: there are all these people, and they will kill you if you don't give them something - fuck them. Those with capital need to leave now and start businesses all over the world, because there is HUGE potential that is not USA and Western world. If USA and Western world want to live by consuming products others produce, they MUST learn that they can only do so by producing something in return.
The only way to do this meaningfully is to allow the market sort out what is needed by market and what is not. Market will figure out the products and services and prices for them and what money is and what regulations are.
So the only way to fix this for USA and Western world is to REDUCE their gov't, not to increase it. There is plenty of demand, but those with that demand are not producing anything, but they would be happy to live wealthier lives, where they CAN buy all those things that an average American can buy right now with counterfeit currency.
Like Hayek and Myrdal? There shouldn't be a Nobel prize of any kind at all for such a trivial non-science as economics.
Resources are scarce. You can go ahead and create a new device, say an 'iCrap' or whatever, and all of a sudden it IS a scarce device, because only you have it.
Somebody else goes and creates another device 'iShit' and they also are the only ones who have it now.
Anything that any person organizes and creates is a scarce resource, and the pricing model depends on what markets will bear.
As to robots creating everything - once you have your super stuff printers and once you figure out the infinite energy, then you will get your wish. Everybody will be sitting there, printing apples and egg salads and shoes and flying cars and new windows for their sea-houses, etc.
As long as energy is not that easy to get, as long as there are no element trans-mutating, molecule bond and long carbon chain printers, etc., that can produce whatever you want for you immediately, there will be scarcity.
Even when you get all of that, somebody will figure out a way to have your body go on for a longer period of time, all of a sudden THAT is a scarce thing - scarce information. Probably a scarce set of machines and procedures are needed, this becomes the new power - being able to prolong your life.
In a place where things are basically free, the power will be then transfered into other realms, like being able to prolong your life, but what will people be paying with? Because nobody wants to GIVE UP such a thing that they own. If you can prolong your life indefinitely and others cannot, you become an interesting outsider with more and more power of some sort over others.
Free stuff does not really come for free. This will modify the humans if not necessarily immediately physically, then mentally and emotionally, they will become something else and there will be a way to get power over them and some people will seek it, as people always do.
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Anyway, until that time that all physical things are easy to multiply at no cost, normal rules of scarcity and economics will continue be applicable.
You invent your 'iShit' and somebody else invents 'iCrap' and you want to exchange the 'iShit' for 'iCrap' and thus this type of relationship will continue and those who invent this stuff and organize capital, land and labor to produce this more efficiently than others will gain market share and will be rich.
But to answer your unwarranted question about 'whining' and 'fairness' - AFAIC people don't want to work, but they will have to, because again, the system we have now is NOT the system that you are describing, with everything being 'free'.
It's NOT free. Somebody has to do WORK. Thus your jabs do not reach their destination - the market will continue as it does, and the only people who will suffer are those, who will participate in market destruction via gov't regulations and taxes and subsidies.
They don't DESERVE your 'iCrap' if they don't produce their 'iShit' that you can get from them by exchange. So you'll produce your 'iCrap' in China and they will stay without anything, any 'iCraps' and 'iShits', they won't have any of it, they'll keep being poor. Since they are also ignorant and quite dumb, they will likely try to build what was tried a number of times and failed as many times - some sort of a communist regime to try and avoid the personal responsibility of running their own lives and economies. This only leads to total loss of all rights and total loss of all wealth.
Just so's you know, the problem isn't taxes, it's demand.
- Just so you know, the problem is not demand, it's supply.
You see, when 2 people trade they are not trading for money, they are trading for things they want. If 1 produces food and another produces fuel, they are trading food for fuel. They are doing so because they both benefit from the comparative advantage of each doing something better - more efficiently than the other.
Money is introduced into the system so it's easy to trade for things that are of not equal value, so a kitchen food processor is not the same value as one eggplant for example.
Money always begins as something valuable, scarce, recognizable, easy to test, easy to measure, not poisonous, not explosive, not radioactive, easy to mint coins out of and something that does not go bad over time, so we've used gold for ages. Eventually people always try to counterfeit the money to be able to BUY stuff but produce NOTHING for it. They invent all sorts of scams, which can be even benign at first - introduce paper bank notes to signify amount of actual gold that a person has, trade with notes, but go to a bank and get your actual money out of it.
Eventually the government hijacks the system and figures out a way to steal everybody's money and start counterfeiting just the paper itself, thus stealing everybody's purchasing power and stealing products without creating anything back into the system. So this is wealth stolen and goods underproduced.
USA is running a scam like that upon the rest of the world because its currency is so called 'reserve' and other productive people give it things, products for the fake currency USA is printing, but nothing can be gotten from USA for this fake currency.
53Billion USD/month and 40% of all gov't money borrowed that is spent is the indicator that USA as a country and the government itself cannot pay for what it consumes, but there is plenty of demand. ALL of the counterfeit money, ALL of the borrowing, ALL of the taxing - it's all demand.
But those who want to consume are not producing. But the reason that production capacity isn't present in the system is the very government that PRICED OUT the US worker from the labor market with all of the regulations, taxes, subsidies, labor laws, everything that makes US worker unproductive, uncompetitive, not worth hiring and thus in reality useless to those, who actually produce for living, and even worse - dead weight, that is consuming but not producing to balance the trade.
Balancing of the trade is not just an esoteric abstract concept, it's very obvious from the monthly imbalance of trade that is easy to show in exact amount of money that is sent abroad minus the money that is sent into USA. The difference is what USA is underproducing.
Those who create jobs - the 'rich', (and no, poor do not create jobs, with any sort of subsidy they only consume wealth, they don't produce it), they now are under a constant attack from all fronts, which is set up by the government that hijacked the economy and is now ruling it into a total collapse.
What is needed is complete stop of all government spending except for bare minimum border protection and the court system. EVERYTHING else needs to stop, all spending needs to stop, all borrowing, debts need to be restructured, millions of unproductive people need to LOSE their jobs. TENS of millions, of people need to lose their jobs. The consumption must stop. People will have to work in order to save real investment capital and restart production and then people can be rehired to do useful, trade imbalance reducing jobs.
NOBODY should be getting any QE, any TARP, any counterfeit money from any government, it all must be balanced within the economy without government intervention.
Economies are created by private individuals who work to live better, that's all there is to it. When economies become strong and rich, governments - the parasites of the economy - become stronger b
Your understanding is wrong, voluntarism only means action in absence of external government power.
This is what Nobel prize should be about - not about politics and non-sciences, like Keynesian witch craft of one solution.
Giving a prize for figuring out how the immune system works? Good.
Giving out a 'war is peace' prize to Obama or 'print till you run out of trees' Krugman? Well, that's just a political statement and I am not sure what good it is at all.
why would you come out with such a ridiculous statement?
WHO says this is the first time this has been done? What is NEW is that the government is fully acknowledging that it is what it's doing, and it's getting CHEERS and APPLAUSE for this, especially from the weird crowd of strange GOP followers, the same kind of people who cheer to Perry when he talks about execution of prisoners and the same guys who cheer for death of person who may not have health insurance - the second one being a very loaded idea, since that would be a strange situation in free market with low prices and a 30 y.o., who'd be making good money in that economy, even if he didn't have insurance, which would be very cheap (insurance used to cost $1/month/person prior to Medicare) and health care would be cheap and all of those products would be getting cheaper every year due to technology and larger markets and thus more competition.
So that crowd of people is now cheering, but also the other crowd is cheering - those of the Democrats who are NOT protesting. Weren't they protesting against the Patriot Act of Bush time, and that thing was only about unconstitutional searches and seizures and prisons, this here is unconstitutional KILLING.
But of-course US gov't killed people prior to this, they did that covertly, which means they at least knew the difference and knew that it was the wrong thing to do. Now they are doing it overtly, totally in the open and are getting applause for this.
this is just too sad. Maybe they should spend 15 minutes and learn something useful and stop this nonsense.